From Abracadabra to Zombies
The Templeton
Fundies
by
Robert T.
Carroll
(published in The
Humanist May/June 2008
revised October 30, 2008)
How much
does it cost to determine scientifically why people believe in
God?
Oxford, the oldest university in the English-speaking world,
thinks it can do it for about $4 million. Well, not Oxford
per se, but researchers at Oxford’s
Ian Ramsey Centre for
Science and Religion and the
Centre for Anthropology and Mind
have been granted £1.9 million by the Templeton Foundation to
try to answer the question about belief.
The Templeton Foundation was founded by Sir John M. Templeton
(he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1987) who became a
billionaire in the mutual fund business. Templeton, born in 1912
in Tennessee, was about 60 years old when he started using his
wealth to promote religion and spirituality. In 1972, he
established the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, which,
in 2001, became the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or
Discoveries About Spiritual Realities. He stipulated that it
should pay more than the Nobel Prize. Templeton died in 2008 at
the age of 95. His son "Jack", a retired pediatric surgeon, has
been running the show since 1995.
In 2007, $1.5 million went to philosopher Charles Taylor, whose
contribution toward progress “about spiritual realities,” said
John “Jack” M. Templeton Jr., has been his argument that
problems such as violence and bigotry can only be solved by
considering both their secular and spiritual dimensions. A
purely secular viewpoint, Taylor argues, leads to fragmented,
faulty results. It is irrelevant to being awarded the prize that
a purely religious viewpoint has, in fact, led to more violence
and bigotry, rather than less. It is also irrelevant that the
word ‘spiritual’—which seems to convey a warm, fuzzy feeling to
many people—is left undefined and is rarely used with any
precise cognitive meaning. The point is not whether the
recipient is right or wrong, clear or vague, but whether his
work can be used to further the propaganda purposes of the
Templeton Foundation.
The 2008 winner, Polish priest and cosmologist Michael Heller,
should help further the Templeton agenda with his question,
“Does the universe need a cause?” Heller posits:
If we ask about the cause of the universe we should ask about a cause of mathematical laws. By doing so we are back in the Great Blueprint of God’s thinking….Why is there something rather than nothing?” When asking this question we are not asking about a cause like all other causes. We are asking about the root of all possible causes.
Heller has resurrected Thomas Aquinas’s
conundrum regarding the cause of an effect versus the cause of a
chain of causes and effects that is not itself part of the
chain. He has couched the conundrum in modern mathematics, which
led Jack Templeton to proclaim: “Michael Heller’s quest for
deeper understanding has led to pioneering breakthroughs in
religious concepts and knowledge as well as expanding the
horizons of science.” Heller’s nominator, Karol Musiol, had this
to say: “It is evident that for him the mathematical nature of
the world and its comprehensibility by humans constitute the
circumstantial evidence of the existence of God.” Neither man
said: given the fact that the universe is governed by
mathematical laws, it is not surprising that creatures with the
ability to understand and appreciate mathematics would evolve.
If they had, they wouldn't get the prize unless they added:
and God said let it be so.
Heller himself says that science is “but a collective effort of
the human mind to read the mind of God.” If by God Heller means
Nature, then he’s right but this hasn’t been a scoop since
Spinoza’s time. Anyway, it’s not what he means, I’m sure. [I
discuss the 2009 winner
here.]
To discover what the Templeton Foundation wants to accomplish we
need only follow the money. Templeton’s endowment is estimated
at $1.1 billion; $60 million is given away each year to promote
its goals.* According to science journalist John Horgan,
the Templeton Foundation has spent more than a quarter of a
billion dollars “on prizes, academic programs, publications,
broadcasts, lectures, conferences, and research on topics such
as the neurobiology and genetics of religious belief; the
evolutionary origins of altruism; and the medical benefits of
prayer, church attendance, and forgiveness.” The Templeton Prize
is awarded in Buckingham Palace each year and even ex-convicts
are eligible as long as they’ve found God. Charles Colson,
Nixon’s chief counsel during Watergate who went to prison for
his troubles, was the winner in 1993. Colson got religion while
in prison and it has provided him with a source of purpose and
income ever since. John Barrow, a cosmologist and mathematician
at the University of Cambridge, won the prize in 2006 for his
work defending the anthropic principle, the idea that it is
unlikely the universe came about by chance. Or, as physicist Bob
Park put it: “If things were different, things would not be the
way things are.”
In addition to its signature prize, Templeton awards ten smaller
prizes and numerous grants to fund, as their website delineates,
“rigorous scientific research and related cutting-edge
scholarship on a wide spectrum of ‘Core Themes’.” How Oxford
plans to use the millions given it by Templeton provides a
window into the goals of the Foundation. In a press release
dated February 19, 2008, Oxford stated that the money is going
to be “used to draw together and promote the latest scientific
ideas about the meaning of religion and its origin in the human
mind.” The press release includes a photo of a child at prayer
with the caption: Nature or nurture? Science will tell.
Dr. Justin Barrett will be playing a lead role in the study. He
is described as “a psychologist who has been at the forefront of
the development of the cognitive science of religion.”
Nature or nurture? Science will
tell.
According to Barrett: “Cognitive science can
help to explain the origin and nature of human religion. [As
opposed to what? Elephant religion?] For example, developmental psychology has
been instrumental in determining that belief in religion seems
to be an integral part of human nature—it is found across all
cultures and is something that we grasp from a young age.” I can
attest to this. I was grasped at a very young age by my parents
and forced to go to church and a religious school. I’ve met
people from many cultures who have had similar experiences.
On a serious note, the notion of human nature is a slippery one.
Humans might trace their ancestry back several million years,
say, to some pre-hominid. Or, we might trace our ancestry back
to hominids emerging some 100,000 or 50,000 years ago. In any
case, there was no religion for most of the evolution that
evolutionary psychologists say determined the best part of
“human nature.” In any case, since the Oxford group is doing
cognitive science, I assume that it intends to find the meaning
of religion and its origin in the human brain. Wouldn’t a
scientific approach leave it an open question as to whether
religion originated in the brain, whatever that might mean?
Oxford says that it is going to use a good amount of the grant
money to teach quantitative skills, which should come in handy
for scientifically determined theologians bent on quantifying
spirituality. It might help them understand, for example,
whether a color patch on an fMRI signifies the presence of a
god, an angel, impure thoughts, or methane gas. “A large part of
the award, £800,000, will be used to run a ‘small grant
competition’ providing 41 grants to support work by a range of
scholars carrying out diverse individual research projects that
will be the building blocks of the further development of the
field.” Perhaps they will prove once and for all that quantum
physics is God’s code for understanding not only divinity, but
also ESP and crop circles.
Of course, no one who cares about science and freedom of inquiry
should complain about other people spending their own money to
study religions in a scientific way. But Oxford seems bent on
using the money to prove certain things about religion and to
validate the value of religion, which seem to be the very same
goals of the Templeton Foundation. Most of the scholars who will
apply for these grants probably believe religion is good,
natural, and true, so using the money to investigate these
issues may seem proper to them. But what kind of science is it
whose goal is to confirm a bias?
Dr. Barrett asks: “is religion a part of the selection process
that has helped us survive or merely a by-product of evolution?”
This is science on the cutting edge. Everybody seems to be doing
it, so it must be good science. Even mental disorders have been
defended as good for the species. Dr. Paul Keedwell, an expert
on mood disorders at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College
London, argues that depression has helped the human race become
stronger. This must be so, he says, otherwise depression would
have been eradicated by evolution. The same thing must be true
of religion. It must be good for us or it would have gone
extinct by now. The thing is, some religions have gone
extinct and it may be just a matter of time until the rest join
them. We’re still evolving. Just because something has survived
to the present doesn’t mean it won’t go extinct in the future.
In the beginning, all religion was magical thinking. It still
is. Does magical thinking have an evolutionary advantage? So far
so good, we might say, but the human species is in its infancy.
If the folks at the Templeton Foundation have their way, magical thinking will continue
to flourish forever. But, for all we know, religion may
eventually be the death of us all.
John Templeton
(1912-2008) was, by all accounts, a decent man who chose
to give a lot of money to people who promote or support his
belief in “spirituality.” Many
secular universities and scientific organizations have accepted
Templeton money. The American Association for the Advancement of
Science, for example, accepted one million dollars "to create
The AAAS Dialogue between Science and Religion" and give "the
illusion that science and religion are finding common ground"
(Park 2008: p. 8).
Taking money from the Templeton
Foundation (TF) might compromise
the critiques of some participants at TF-sponsored conferences, says John Horgan (himself a
recipient of Templeton largesse). For example, several
scientists who attended a Templeton-sponsored conference at
Stanford University, titled “Becoming Human: Brain, Mind, and
Emergence,” told him that “they did not want to challenge the
beliefs of religious speakers for fear of offending them and the
Templeton hosts.”
“The dialogue was nominal,” says Horgan. “Each side listened
politely to the other’s presentations without really commenting
on them.”
Even so, some atheists are invited to Templeton-funded events.
They’re not invited to promote atheism and attack religion, of
course, though that is what the ungracious and unapologetic
Richard Dawkins did at
one such event. Dawkins and other renowned atheists, philosopher
Daniel Dennett and physicist Steven Weinberg, have either spoken
at or attended conferences supported at least in part by the
Templeton Foundation. The only scientist I am aware of who has
publicly stated he won’t take any money from Templeton is Sean
Carroll, a
physicist at Cal Tech. According to Carroll, “the entire purpose
of the Templeton Foundation is to blur the line between
straightforward science and explicitly religious activity,
making it seem like the two enterprises are part of one big
undertaking.”
The money given to Oxford should make the line between science
and religion even blurrier. Oxford will be promoting a premier
goal of the Templeton Foundation: anti-secularism. Jack
Templeton made this goal clear in his comments on the worthiness
of Charles Taylor:
Throughout his career, Charles Taylor has staked an often lonely position that insists on the inclusion of spiritual dimensions in discussions of public policy, history, linguistics, literature, and every other facet of humanities and the social sciences.
The subtext is clear: secular science alone can’t solve our
problems. We must seek our answers in a realm that includes the
non-secular,
The TF’s anti-secularism is also evident from the fact that
Taylor was nominated for the Templeton prize by the Rev. David
A. Martin, Ph.D., emeritus professor of sociology at the London
School of Economics and author of A General Theory of
Secularization, which, among other things, laments the way
religion has been marginalized by sociology and pushed to the
periphery of significance in some quarters. (Taylor wrote a
blurb for the back cover of Martin’s follow-up: On
Secularization: Towards A Revised General Theory, published
in 2005.) Taylor’s latest work, A Secular Age, was
published last September by Belknap Press. It is being promoted
as “the definitive examination of secularization and the modern
world.” At 896 pages, it is certainly the heftiest examination
of religion in a secular world.
Those who argue that our only hope for peace on earth is to
become purely secular will never win the Templeton prize. To win
the Templeton Prize, one must be selective and focus on those
aspects of “spirituality” that don’t involve bigotry, hatred,
ignorance, or superstition. If you ignore many religions, many
religious beliefs, and many religious practices, you can come up
with a fine set of ideas showing how spirituality must move back
to the center from the periphery if we wish to live free in a
new golden age. I look at it a little differently than Charles
Taylor does. In my opinion, secularism is a
necessary but not a sufficient condition for peace on earth and
for understanding the things of this universe. Religion, on the
other hand, is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for
continued misery and obfuscation of even the simplest truths.
For a million dollars, I'll tell them why that’s so. For another
million, I’ll do it in 900 pages.
March 7,
2008
revised October 30, 2008
Sources (last accessed on March 4, 2008, except for Park, which was accessed in October 2008)
further reading
The 2009 (not prestigious) Templeton Prize Winner is....
The 2010 (not prestigious) Templeton Prize Winner is....
“Current Prize
Winner,” March 14, 2007.
“Scientific study into religious belief launched,” The
University of Oxford press release. February 19, 2008.
On Templeton money (from the blog Evolving Thoughts): "I would love to get a grant to support that work, and indeed as an academic I am required to seek grant money....it looks to me ... that the foundation itself is moving in a more or less independent fashion....So maybe I will apply."
On the other hand, there is this from God, Science and Philanthropy: "It doesn't help that the foundation is a longstanding donor to conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. And while its founder preferred eternal questions to worldly politics, the son who has succeeded him, John Templeton Jr.—Jack—is a conservative Evangelical who spends his personal time and money opposing gay marriage and defending the Iraq War. Since his father's death, concerns have swirled among the foundation's grantees and critics alike that Jack Templeton will steer the foundation even further rightward and, perhaps, even further from respectable science."
Geoghegan, Tom. “Is depression good for you?” February 28, 2008,
BBC News.
Gledhill, Ruth. “Why do we believe in God? £2m study prays for
answer,” Timesonline. February 19, 2008,
Horgan, John. “The Templeton Foundation: A Skeptic’s Take,”
April 5, 2006,
Park, Robert L. (2008). Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science. Princeton University Press.
-----------------------------
The only prize the author ever won was in
high school when the San Diego Knights of Columbus gave him a
$100 U.S. Savings Bond for an essay on why the Catholic Church
did not need more priests, just better priests. His religion
teacher, Fr. Mooney, told him he was wrong and that he didn’t
deserve the prize.